My Drama Dilemma

For those of you who don’t know, I love dramas. I even watch them without subtitles… on my television… because I live in Korea for goodness’ sake! (And then I read about what happened in a recap the next day.) It’s helped my Korean tremendously, watching these dramas. (Sometimes I’ll whip out a Korean phrase and shock my Korean friends with my excellent accent. Aaaand sometimes my attempt fails miserably.) However, I am facing a dilemma of terrific proportions.

The faithful drama watcher knows that there are 3 main networks: SBS, KBS, and MBC (He/she might also know that KBS airs its dramas on the KBS2 channel.), and 4 main timeslots for primetime dramas: 10 pm Monday and Tuesday, 10 pm Wednesday and Thursday, 9pm Saturday and Sunday, and 10 pm Saturday and Sunday. So, there can be as many as 3 primetime dramas per timeslot, (Now, the weekends are often taken up with long dramas that don’t draw the international drama watcher (Secret Garden was an exception.), so the average watcher pays attention to the weekday dramas.) and there’s where my problem comes in:

There are 5 dramas right now that I am interested in watching. Three (49 Days, Best Love, and Romance Town) are Wed-Thurs and two (Baby-Faced Beauty and Lie to Me) are Mon-Tues. Since a. I watch dramas on TV, and b. my internet is rather slow when loading videos, I can only realistically watch 2 dramas out of those 5. Here are the contenders:

I’ve been watching 49 Days since it began, and I love it. Since next week is the finale, that helps to pare the choices down to 4, but that still means that the other Wed-Thurs dramas will be airing episodes I can’t watch (or would have to watch online) in the meantime.

Best Love is written by the Hong sisters, who also wrote the (international) smash hit, You’re Beautiful, and the (ratings) hit, My Girlfriend is a Gumiho, and those are just their more recent dramas. Best Love is also being recapped, which dramatically enhances my enjoyment of a drama. (It also appears to be funny, cute, and heartwarming. And punny… which might work better with subtitles if I were to choose one to watch online.)

Romance Town has Jung Kyeo-woon. If you saw Dr Champ, you know how cute this guy is. I also have an oppa who looks like him, which makes me a bigger fan of JKW. Is that logical? No. Do I care? No. Romance Town also has a promising premise with an employer-maid/upstairs-downstairs dynamic going on. However, it’s not currently being recapped, so if I watched it on TV, I would only have my limited Korean to help me understand what’s going on.

Lie to Me has Yoon Eun-hye (Who is possibly best known among international fans for her role in Coffee Prince.). It also has a contract marriage premise, and, I’ll confess, I’m a sucker for a good contract marriage. (What? I’m being honest here!) It’s also on Mon-Tues, so it’s only competing with Baby-Faced Beauty, and it’s being recapped.

Baby-Faced Beauty has Choi Daniel, who was adorkable in Cyrano Dating Agency, and looks adorkable in this one, too. However, I’m not a huge fan of the completely clueless, irresponsible, man-boy he showed in the first episode, so it’s looking like Lie to Me will win the Mon-Tues competition.

So there it is, my drama dilemma. What do you think? Which dramas should I follow? Which should I cut? Which one(s) are you watching?